


People Who Didn't Talk

by MarinaTheBloody



Series: People Who Talk [2]
Category: Daria (Cartoon)
Genre: Deeply awkward romantic tension, F/M, Pre-Relationship, Road Trips, Unresolved resolved tension, basically a bottle episode, deeply awkward sexual tension, post confession of love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:48:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27584998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarinaTheBloody/pseuds/MarinaTheBloody
Summary: After confessing love for each and then losing contact for a year, Trent and Daria end up back in proximity while staying at the Lane house, and then in even closer proximity when she catches a ride with Trent back to Boston. They try to get used to each other again, and then get back to where they were a year ago. Most of this story takes place on that drive. Hijinks ensue, lots of cuteness.
Relationships: Trent Lane/Daria Morgendorffer
Series: People Who Talk [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2016419
Kudos: 9





	People Who Didn't Talk

**Author's Note:**

> Partially a follow-up to "Like People Who Talk" but it's not at all necessary to know that, this is a stand alone

Daria sat in Trent’s bright yellow car that didn’t smell like cigarettes and thought back to last summer. He had this car the last time she had seen him, a year ago at a coffee shop where they decided they were still in love, where they kissed in front of Jane’s apartment, and where they parted ways without talking about a next. They had agreed not to disappear on eachother, but a month after that day, they did just that, returning to radio silence stasis. He was still married when he got home and she was still nineteen, twenty now, sitting in his car as a long drive stretched before them. 

They had spent the last week in the same place, for the first time in a year. Back in Lawndale, where Daria and Jane were on summer vacation, and where Trent and Mystik Spiral were playing a string of shows before heading back to Boston, their new home base. Jane, Daria, and the entire band were all trapped in the Lane house, Daria refusing to deal with Quinn and her parents’ questions about her future. Trent and Daria hadn’t talked properly, they had a silent agreement to avoid each other so carefully that they could deny it if Jane pressed. 

The exception was one night, when Jesse’s dad died, and Trent had stayed up later than usual talking to him about it. He went outside for some air and found Daria sitting on the porch, chain smoking. 

“Hey,” he said, walking over to sit on the cool cement next to her, not too close, but closer than they had been all week. 

“Hey. What are you doing out here?” Daria replied, turning, ever so slightly, in his direction. 

“I wanted to stop being in there. Needed some air, I guess. Can I get one of those?” He gestured towards the pack of cigarettes next to Daria’s foot, “When did you start smoking, anyway?”

“Yeah, go for it.” Daria nudged the pack closer to Trent with the edge of her boot. “It turns out that sometimes taking almost nothing but creative writing classes puts you in a good position to accidentally start smoking.” 

Trent nodded, he looked exhausted, drained, he propped his forearms on his knees and let them dangle, limp. She lifted her hand, looked at it, moved it toward him and pulled it back, and then put it on his shoulder. Physical contact like that was confusing. Was she allowed to do this? He was still married and the last time they had seen each other they were in love. She squeezed his shoulder and he leaned, almost but not quite, on her shoulder. Her arm, apparently making its own decisions at this point, circled his torso and hugged him. 

“I’m really glad you came back.” He wasn’t looking at her while he was talking, instead making deliberate eye contact with the fence across the yard. 

“Yeah,” she said, almost glancing at him but thinking better of it in case he noticed, “me too.”

Trent sat back up and they sat like that for a while, not talking, but sitting closer than they had been, closer than they had been all week. It was when he had leaned on her, and she felt a bolt of fear and excitement rush through her, that she finally remembered the scope of her feelings for him, and how much she wanted to be the person he talked to like this. 

That was two days before she wound up in his bright green car, waiting for him to get gas before they went off on their journey back to the city they both called something like home these days. 

She had to get back to Boston before work the next day and didn’t have a plan to get there until, that is, she overheard Trent mention he was headed back that day. Forgoing her usual awkwardness and second guesses, she immediately asked if she could ride with him. He said yes, didn’t even ask her for gas money, just that she buy sodas and snacks while he got gas. 

Trent got back in the car from pumping gas and immediately took off his shirt, grabbed one of the sodas she bought and started the four hour trip back to Boston. _Of course he drives with his shirt off._ She didn’t know how to feel about that, suddenly aware of herself in relation to him. 

For the first half hour she drifted in and out of consciousness, she hadn’t really slept right the night before, anxieties and the summer heat keeping her up. And, of course, last night was the first she could remember forgetting to charge her phone. It died twenty minutes into the trip and Trent’s had started out the day dead. They had no music, no distractions. It would only be months later that Daria noticed they hadn’t even tried the radio. 

For a bit they did the awkward chatting. The complaining about Lawndale, the talking about his band and her almost thesis. Neither of them had slept much for the past week, and maybe, she would decide later, that explained how all the jokes started. 

It became a game to see how dirty they could make a landmark or road sign, set off by the “title of your sex tape” jokes that no one could stop making earlier that week. Trent was surprised that Daria was joining in on group dirty jokes, surprised that she had started smoking, surprised by how much more tired she looked than the last time he had seen her. 

“You want to pull off at the “park and ride” to Hard Rock State Park?” he asked, testing the waters for jokes of a more specific variety. 

Before this drive, Daria had not been able to hold the idea of her and Trent being _together_ in her head, it felt voyeuristic, imposing, unrealistic. After three solid hours of making jokes about fucking by the side of the road, that mental block faded away. She felt like the scenes she played in her head of kissing him could go further. She could imagine being with him, like that. 

“As long as it’s near the “chain up zone,”” she countered, deciding to test the waters herself, later on she would blame this boldness on sleep deprivation. 

“Damn, it’s summer, I don’t have my chains.” Trent jumped right to accepting that he had no idea what was going on but that he was really interested in finding out. 

“Well shit, next time then.”

“Definitely next time,” he looked over at her, relaxed in his passenger seat staring out the window with a small smile on her face. He couldn’t believe it, not that she was there, not that she was relaxed, not that she was smiling, and certainly not that they were going back and forth making sex jokes _about them_. 

She sat up straight and pointed out the window, “Oh my god. Oh. My. God.” 

Trent looked out to see the billboard she was pointing at, coughed and laughed, “You wanna go?”

“It says there’s a taxidermy shop and museum in this small town we’ve never heard of, of course I want to go.”

Trent switched lanes to pull off at the next exit. Taxidermy was more Daria’s thing than it was his, but he could never get enough of seeing her smile, and stopping to check out this museum seemed like a pretty good way to get to see it. “Do you remember where it said it was?” 

“Shit. No.”

“This town is so small, we’ll totally be able to find it.” Trent assured her.

After twenty minutes spent poorly scouring a town they could have walked across (okay, minus the farmlands) in five, they gave up. Maybe they got the wrong exit, maybe the billboard was up just to trap curious outsiders, maybe they just wanted to be lost together. Maybe neither of them knew it at the time, but they were both secretly happy they never found the shop. 

“I think there’s a river there,” Trent pointed out, nodding to a little dirt parking lot almost under a bridge. 

“It looks like it. Wanna check it out?” Daria was almost smiling at him, staring directly forward now instead of out the passenger window. She darted her eyes to her left and saw Trent damn near beaming. 

They parked. There was a river there, he’d been right. A real river, albeit one that ran directly under the highway. They walked under the bridge and Trent nodded in the direction of the water and cocked a half smile. Daria got it, smiled, and started taking off her boots just as Trent was undoing the laces on his sneakers. 

There was a branch. Root maybe? Daria couldn’t be sure. Either way it was a thick enough part of a tree that she and Trent could both sit on it with their feet in the river. She had both of her hands braced on either side of her, worried she’d slip or fall or something else horribly embarrassing. Trent has his hands braced on the branch too, situated closer to what could be called the shore, his 6 foot self much more confident that he’d be fine if he slipped. He, over the course of three minutes, managed to scoot one of his hands over to Daria, placed it next to hers in such a way that it could be called an accident. In such a way that would necessarily require her to move her hand away or find a way to meet his. She weighed her options and decided she’d already made a choice when it came to conversation and that she might as well just do what she wanted. 

Daria moved her hand over to his and laced their fingers together. It shocked them both to find, a few seconds later, that they were holding hands with hers still braced on the branch to keep from falling. They sat like that for a bit, trading smiling glances that the other never saw until Trent spoke up.

“Hey. I think I found something.”

“Found something?”

“Yeah.” Trent, as much as he didn’t want to, pulled his foot out of the water with an unidentifiable bone clutched between his toes. 

“What the fuck is that?”

“I have absolutely no fucking clue. But it looks like a bone.” He said as he grabbed it from his foot and examined it more closely. 

“It does, it must be, right?”

“Hey, Daria,” Trent took a breath as he said something he’d been wanting to say for a couple years now, in one context or another, “Wanna bone?” He took the bone he’d been examining and extended it to her with his free hand. Daria couldn’t contain herself and laughed a laugh. A real and audible laugh, and it’d been because of something he’d done. Trent let out a sigh he hadn’t even realized that he’d been holding in.

“Yes, Trent. I want a bone.” He handed it over. She grabbed it with her free hand. The one closest to Trent was still otherwise occupied with, well, him. The bone looked more like the tusk of a mini-rhino than anything else, but she wanted it to be a bone, wanted Trent to have found her a bone in that little river. Months later, she would still have absolutely no idea what it was, but still displayed it proudly on her bookshelf.

___

They were back in Trent’s ugly little car, though it was starting to grow on Daria now. “My feet won’t be done drying until we get there,” and even she didn’t know if she was complaining or not at this point. Yes, her feet wouldn’t dry enough to put her boots back on, but there was not a part of her that regretted any moment of sitting with him by that river. She was barely sure that the bone he had fished out of that river for her was even a bone, but she was absolutely sure that it would be counted among her sparse decorations until it was lost or something dramatic happened. 

Trent laughed, coughed, laughed, “I’m sorry we couldn’t find the shop.”

“It’s okay, I think we had more fun anyway. Besides, free bone,” she smiled, looking right at him this time. 

“Title of your sex tape? That was kind of lame, but I couldn’t help it.”

“Definitely the title of your sex tape,” Daria answered back. 

Trent reached over to the passenger’s seat and took Daria’s hand in his. Neither of them said anything about it, scared that saying anything out loud would make it too real and they’d have to stop. They did, however, both look at each other, directly at each other, and smile real smiles. 

___

When they finally got back to Boston, Trent drove Daria up to her apartment and turned the car off. They paused, neither of them particularly into the idea of parting ways. 

“So, I was thinking, I wanna do an experiment,” he took off his seatbelt and turned to face her. “I want to see what happens when I say a couple things.”

Daria turned to face him and realized that she had stopped breathing. Nothing good ever came from anything along the lines of ‘we need to talk’. “Okay. What’s up.”

“I’m in love with you,” he said and she immediately heard a ringing in her ears, convinced that there was no way he was saying that. Trent continued, “I have been for a few years now. I’ve been trying to come up with some way or some good time to tell you, especially after last year and what happened after, but this seems as right a time as any. I love you so fucking much and I’m so sorry that we lost contact last year, I got scared. The second thing, I’m going to leave Monique, I should have done it a long time ago, it’s been a crappy relationship for a while now and I realized I’ll never love her as much as I love you. I didn’t think it was possible to actually feel like this about someone. The third thing is that I really, really want to be kissing you right now.”

Daria was absolutely certain that her heart had stopped beating or, potentially, started beating faster than the speed of light. She’d spent actual years fantasizing about him saying some version of “it’s you, it’s always been you”. Since he’d told her he loved her last year, it was all she could think about, especially after they stopped talking again. Her brain short circuited. “Uhhhh.”

“You don’t have to say anything back, I just wanted to find out what would happen if I said those things.” Trent started internally panicking, somehow maintaining his normal laid back demeanor. 

“No no, uh, so I’m bad at this, fuck.” Daria frantically searched for words, literally any words she could string together that would almost make sense. After some careful consideration she came to the conclusion that she was unable to satisfyingly string together anything coherent and realized she hadn’t said anything in way too long. Finally, she came up with a solution. She saw his almost visibly panicked face and decided that, perhaps, the thing she should do was to get way closer to the face of the man she’d been in love with for years. She leaned over the gear shift between them, hesitated slightly and realized she’d come way too far to hesitate now. She used one hand to keep herself from falling and put the other on the side of his face, bringing it closer to hers for a kiss and, as she did that, she saw all the panic in his face immediately melt away. A big kiss, a very real and long kiss. A kiss that possibly devolved into what some might call “making out”. After a few minutes they needed to come up for air and, she whispered hoarsely, “I’m in love with you, so so in love with you.”

Trent pulled back slightly and stared so softly into her eyes, “Where should we go from here?”

“I was thinking maybe we could go up to my apartment?”

“Yes. That. Let’s do that immediately.” Trent was smiling more than she’d ever seen. She took his hand and went to open the door before realizing that she couldn’t both hold his hand and get out of the car. 

“This is so much better than always having to leave you in front of a door,” Trent said when they finally made it up to her apartment, making it through the door.

“I feel like we might never have to do that again unless we want to.” Daria said, smiling as wide a smile as Trent’s and almost laughing.

“Very cool. Very cool.”


End file.
